I gave my keynote talk last evening at the 28th Annual Tate Conference. I also passed out the handout shown above so people could have a handy reference for sauropod biology while I was talking. I have a link to a PDF version at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer it that way. Now that the talk’s done, I’m letting my “abstract” out into the world, here (link) and at the bottom of this post.

As iconic as Brachiosaurus altithorax is, it’s known from surprisingly little material.

I was cleaning out my Downloads directory — which, even after my initial forays, still accounts for 11 Gb that I really need to reclaim from my perptually almost-full SSD. And I found this beautiful image under the filename csgeo4028.jpeg . Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH PR 25107 during excavation. The thing is, I have no idea where this image came from.

Just a quick post about the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper (Taylor and Wedel 2023) that I wrote about at the very end of last year. Although this is in some respects a minor paper, I’m fond of it because it fell into place so quickly and easily.

As we’ve often observed, it’s a funny thing that incredibly well-known dinosaur specimens can sit around for decades, or for more than a century, before someone notices something fascinating about them. One lesson to learn from this is the importance of collections — their creation, maintenance and accessibility. Another is of course to always look at the fossils we see.

As all good SV-POW! regulars will know, Elmer S. Riggs published the name Brachiosaurus altothorax in a short (but not trival) 1903 paper (Riggs 1903) and followed it up with a proper descriptive monograph (Riggs 1904) that had several useful plates. I’ve never seen a real copy of the latter (or indeed the former), so for the last quarter-century I’ve made do with various low-quality photocopies and scans.

That’s FMNH PR 25107, better known as a the holotype of Brachiosaurus altithorax — the biggest known dinosaur at the time of its description (Riggs 1903) and still for my money one of the most elegant, along with its buddy and one-time genus-mate Giraffatitan brancai . I had a spare morning in Chicago two Tuesday ago, and Bill Simpson (collection manager of fossil vertebrates at the Field Museum) managed to fit it a collections

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My Oct. 13 National Fossil Day public lecture, “Lost Giants of the Jurassic”, for the Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey is now up on their YouTube channel. First 48 minutes are talk, last 36 minutes are Q&A with audience, moderated by Dr. Julia McHugh. New stuff from the 2021 field season — about which I’ll have more to say in the future — starts at about the 37-minute mark.